


Decisions

by kanonberiz



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: College AU, During, F/M, Gen, NO ONE IS PLAYING HOLST IN THE SERVER PARDON HIS… LACK OF PRESENCE HERE, aka a solo detailing hilda's feelings pre-, also college au hilda likes anime and games, and post-loa, emetophobia in first chapter, hilda's comeback, i hAVE NOT PLAYED MUCH 3H, i have not played 3h extensively so pardon the mischaracterization, more of college au hilda character study, none of the ships are that much of a focus, she's coming back a new and better girl, this was based on a group discord rp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-11-02 00:43:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20563958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kanonberiz/pseuds/kanonberiz
Summary: "I'll break up with him. Decide in 24 hours."No."Can you come to my room, please? I need someone right now."No.She never asked for any of this.





	1. Chapter 1: Pre - LOA

**Author's Note:**

> this dramatic arc stressed me out but im not one to shy away from important plot developments no matter how drastic and unprepared i was. so have hilda from a private college au rp server trying to find herself again.

_ She was used. _

The fact of the matter is, she was used by Dorothea and Claude both, as if to further whatever trust building activity they had going. Worse still, was that Claude, of all people, would try to take advantage of her and her feelings-- feelings she had no intention of letting him dwell on now that he had  _ her _ .

It was a mistake to watch them curiously while they flirted in between class, or to look a little longer than necessary whenever she caught them acting all snuggly as Dorothea hooked her arm with Claude's and tiptoed into his room. It  _ hurt _ , but she didn't really want to do anything with it. She just lost her chance to be the girl he was doing those things with, as dangerously close as she may have had to come to that point.

She always wondered if he caught the longing in her eyes whenever they'd stick their foreheads together, talking in hushed voices about how homework sucked and how she should use this equation in this one problem--  _ Hilda, are you doing this on purpose to get me to come closer to your face?  _ She had laughed then, sweet and embarrassed and flighty, and only winked at him, cooing about how he's sooo smart and looks better up close like this. Now she knows how he felt.

He felt the same way, but he was just as blind to her feelings as she was to his.

Well, it's their loss, honestly. And now that it's come to him dating the sexiest girl in the student body, she had no reason to hold on. It should've been so easy to let go, just as easy as shrugging off people asking her to do this and that, just as easy as moving to the next pitiful guy who has come running right into her lap asking for her attention. It was supposed to be easy, except it wasn't.

It was her mistake for slipping up. Somehow her jealousy has morphed into a twisted form of teasing. It wasn't anything serious, she thinks. She's just trying her best to act like Claude never existed in a way he can only exist in her heart, only to get pulled back by the way his eyebrows crease and the corners of his mouth drop into this really sad pout.  _ Cute _ , she thinks, and then she says it out loud, and then he's smiling again, and she wishes time would stop then and there.

Hilda hides her emotions best with half-sincere jokes, but it was this that caused her own undoing. She hadn't meant it  _ that way _ when she called attention to the house leader leaving her for some Black Eagle singer, but the joke didn't quite land, unfortunately, and maybe it was this very ill-laden jester that had him telling Dorothea about their history.

She didn't really want to remember how they were before, or what they could have been. Dimitri looks cute, Sylvain looks cute, there were other cute fish in the sea and she's not so bad herself. Moving on should come as fast to her as a hip snap as she preoccupies herself with dancing in happiness at the prospect of free cake baked by Ferdinand and eating it with Edelgard. To cry so ugly when faced with an impending dilemma of having Claude back all to herself at the cost of losing his one and only happiness at the moment horrified her so much the cake started tasting less like a sweet and more like vile poison. Out of Ferdinand's view, in the safety of her own room, she started throwing up the precious pastry in the toilet in a shaking frenzy, hoping Dorothea gets the unabashed, unyielding "**NO**"s she sent in an effort to stop the impending catastrophe.


	2. Chapter 2: During LOA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> she finds solace

Dorothea didn't. The catastrophe went on in full force, and now all three of them are incapacitated.

While Claude and Dorothea wallowed in drinking and breaking down-- _exactly the same_, she had told him when he asked her to come to his room and she had to force out a confession when he asked for a kiss and revealed his already long past gotten-over feelings that have absolute no hope of solving anything now-- Hilda preoccupied herself with running away. She's heard rumors around the college calling her some sneaky little boyfriend stealer, some perfectly spoiled rich brat who always got what she wanted because she was just  _ that _ princess who never failed to get whatever whims. She assumed Dorothea had a riot crying out in a nearby bar about those, and it nearly makes her laugh.

Expectations or none, people will always push on her whatever idea they have about her.

So Hilda does what Hilda does best when the going gets tough: she runs away, because her heart is soft like jelly and carries painful words like this inside her gut, harrowing her down like a sack full of heavy stones in the river. How far she plans to run away, she isn't so sure. She just wants to get away from everyone looking at her like she has to be doing something expected of some narcissistic noble, looking only at herself and her nails and how her hair flies in the wind as she struts down the hall and looks for her next victims.

Papers filed and her leave finalized, Hilda preoccupies herself with packing her things. So much of her room has been customized to fit her-- but it's so cathartic to tear away the anime posters, to take the big corkboard off the wall with all her anime pins and keychains and prints, to fold the subtly Sakura Haruno themed blankets and comforters, and to put her sakura shampoo-conditioner-body soap mix into a ziplock bag and into her big pink suitcase with its big pink cat ears. It's a lot of work, too much work, but if she's gonna do this discreetly, she's the only one who should be doing it and with as little flair as possible. It's not like carrying all these home with her bare hands would be a problem.

She times her leave when everybody is preoccupied with class. Sneaking out of the dorm, where no one who absolutely is present at the moment, didn't pose much of a problem with her. Hilda takes the time to look around, pointedly avoiding looking at Claude's room, and after inhaling the familiar scent of the deers, she leaves.

She's past the gates of the house when she shrugs her itabag closer, special bells attached to a tiny Madoka plush ringing at the movement, and it is then that she catches a gasp of her name from someone so familiar. Her breath catches in her throat as she looks towards who called her, and she's more than frantic, more than a literal deer in headlights caught lugging their precious children with her.

"Wh-what are you doing here--" she cries out, a quiet snarl.

"...Are you leaving?" Dimitri asks cautiously, almost sounding wounded. She does not need this, of all times, not with rumors about her circling about. People are bound to get the wrong idea if they see him like this with her.

"Look, you should be in class or something," she mutters quickly, eyes looking around in panic. "I-I gotta go, okay?"

"Go where?" For a moment, Hilda sees a flash of lonely pain in his eyes. Might be from his other… injuries. His cheek is still swollen from that altercation with Felix, or so she's been told, and… was that his hand bandaged tight? What the hell happened to this dude?

"...Moving abroad," she replies, a little guilty at her lie. " _ Studying  _ abroad," she clarifies after a small clear of her throat. "You can tell everyone not to miss me too much," she finishes lamely, winking his way, and moving on before he could say another word. She practically scurries as fast as her little legs could take her, her face burning and her eyes stinging.

Hilda makes sure to get in her expensive private car ride home a few streets from where the Garreg Mach College is located, somewhere few students gathered and would know about. How she managed this, she doesn't quite know, her vision blurry and wet the whole time, but the familiar family butler-driver greets her worriedly and frees her of her physical baggage, and now she's left with the emotional ones as she lays down in the backseat and cries her heart out.

Holst welcomes her with a concerned hug, holding her tight and warm and she lets him spoil her for a few days, where he personally treats her to all the stuff toys and figmas and fighting games her heart hopes to fill the void. Hell, he even financed her tiny whims of finding some mannequin maker-- nearly of the… salacious kind, but she has these dolls specifically made to be beat up and with the face and shape of the two people who's wronged and betrayed her. They're good temporary distractions, and nobody asks about anything. Just the way she wants it to be.

Eventually Holst has to focus on his business, and it leaves Hilda back to her own worries. She preoccupies her time with beating up 2d characters on television with more 2d characters, fingers chapped and tired from all the combos, and if she's not doing that, she's glaring daggers at her new "dolls" and punching them as hard as she can. It isn't very effective, and barely does anything with the plush, only give back that stupid smile in return, and it infuriates her so much she has to consume a whole entire cake to placate her anger.

When nothing's quite working anymore, and she's starting to pick up some fat here and there, Hilda groans in defeat and cries a healthy amount again. The whole routine has been tiring her out ever so greatly, and she's annoyed, angry, miserable, and upset all at the same time. Her phone has been dead for the longest while, and looking for the slightest bit of stimulation, just about anything to make her feel more than all of this and something better and more fulfilling, she plugs it in again.

The messages and calls were expected, assaulting her hand with incessant vibrations and late notifications about where she's gone to, what she's doing, is she okay? To her own personal comfort and disappointment, Claude has not reached out to her, nor even sent her a goodbye. At least her pride tells her she had the last word, and that should be enough.

She eventually reaches Dimitri's name, and Hilda bites her lip, remembering their last encounter. Not a moment she'll ever be proud of, that's for sure. But she remembers how sad and in pain he looked, with all those physical injuries and probably something deeper before they even met for the last time… Before she knows it, she's already writing a message, concern winning over her like a moth flying to a flame. It's pretty silly of her to attempt to help him, but half of it is her asking for help, too. Sincere, earnest help.

> _ > hey. _
> 
> _ > i lied. im in my mansion right now _
> 
> _ > do u want my address? i need someone to help me get into boxing _
> 
> _ > do you do boxing?  _
> 
> _ > let's do boxing together, ok! or just watch me ig ;o _
> 
> _ > u cant say no _

* * *

Dimitri comes to her mansion, surprisingly, after acknowledging her text message. Already she can feel his concern, and it makes waiting for him packed with so much anxiety and worry that he catches her screaming while she played her fighting games when he arrives. She had to explain she was enjoying the release way too much to notice her maids introduce him into the room, but this at least makes him chuckle a little bit, cheek bruise nearly gone but bandage on hand still very much present.

Hilda doesn't let him leave until she's hugged him, squeezed him as warmly as she could muster. Before she knows it, she's crying and tearing up on his shoulder, and she understands then that this was what she truly needed: a sort of calming hug before the storm that would decide her fate. Her anxieties spill out of her like rushing water, probably too fast and carrying Dimitri in a horribly tumultuous current, but he listens and pets her hair that drapes around her gross sobbing face, just quietly listening to her and gently coaxing her to continue when it seems she's choking on words that can't find themselves.

At the end of it all, it baffles Hilda why she had chosen Dimitri to confide in after all this, and as she lays on his lap and reaches for his bandaged hand, she can't help but ask him for his story. In some ways it felt selfish to find comfort in another broken man, but knowing she isn't alone makes her feel valid, and having someone who actually listens to her true feelings calmly and without judgment makes her happy. Besides the curiosity, she had been concerned about him for as long as he was about her, and this mutual revelation brings the first genuine smile out of her in weeks that she can't help but throw herself all over Dimitri again, pulling him close and crying just a tiny bit more but out of unrestrained happiness.

She makes an excuse of the late night to talk about the boxing affair to both send him off and to keep him coming back. The next time he comes with her in a gym, and the next she shows off two of her customized punching bags she lovingly named  _ Cloud and Dorothy, _ and invited him to come to a factory to make his own. For the next few days and weeks she devotes herself to these activities, sparring with Dimitri when she can, and for the first time  _ she's free. _

After nearly half a year, she finds enough clarity to branch out from just boxing. She discovers stability in lifting, realizing carrying the weights do more for her metaphorical suffering than she thinks. With each weight she gives them a name and a pain, and then she lifts them, and when she does it well enough for her trainer to applaud her for having such strength, she recognizes the swell of pride inside her, strong and fierce and remarkable. She's stronger than this, stronger than she thinks, and everyone can see it but her.


	3. Chapter 3: Coming back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> H(ILDA)ERO'S COMEBACK MAKE SOME NOISE

Hilda is a year late to everyone else when she comes back, but she doesn't think too hard on it. It's never too late to realize her potential, or so Claude would have told her two years before, and in this case, she's just found the opportunity to maximize it.

When she's not busy sparring with some of the boys in the gym who scoff at her short stature, she's showing off to the others in the gym who eye her suspiciously at the amount of weights she's added. Hilda realizes the obvious surprise and admiration they give her is  _ good _ , hypes her up in a different way from how everyone looks at her with reverence as if she's just some pretty model walking on the ramp, and it feels  _ so unbearably good and comforting _ to know she's more than first impressions. That she's in control of the expectations she's getting, and in a way that makes her powerful and strong and her movements just as effortless as winking at that freshman that just passed by her and stares at her, mystified. That she's a surprise breaking out of some box everyone has put her in, and she doesn't have to live up to anyone else's expectations but herself's.

Hilda brings out her schedule, her details-- she still has the same dorm room, and she's ready to personally revamp it into her newer preferences: boxing bag and dumbells in the corner, a bigger mirror right beside it, more clothes and new fighting game figmas on the shelves, the cutest heart-shaped bottles for her perfumes, body wash, and soaps, and a motivational poster from Faris Nyannyan. She's packed some extra pans and kitchen utensils-- in the days when she finally found the courage to contact both Edelgard and Ferdinand, she happily proclaims Ferdinand inspired her to learn how to cook for herself. Quietly, Hilda wishes the freshman had been ogling her for the ludicrously heavy baggage she's carrying around like nothing.

It's still her, still Hilda Valentine Goneril, and she'll be damned before she lets go of her personal brand of charming her way out of anyone's personal requests of her, but at least this time.. This time she's sure not to be used.

**Author's Note:**

> the stress


End file.
